Last week I explained the meanings behind the prologue of The Twelfth Window, you can see it on http://12windows.com.
Now I will get started on the first chapter, which also begins the first Act. The book is divided into five Acts, denoted in the actual pages of the book by three, small stained-glass window icons. The chapters are separated by thred, small star icons. Most books are separated with chapter names and numbers, but I wasn’t moved to write it that way. Instead, I tried to make the opening sentence memorable, so that when you go back and read past chapters, you know exactly what the chapter was about just from the feel of the opening sentence. You will also notice the shortness of the chapters. I did that on purpose, too.
“The place was empty…” is about a dream that the heroine of the story, Lisa Chess, has about being in a house of worship and touching the scrolls. Then she is abruptly awakened by her mother. Lisa and her family go to worship and thoughts about her dream pervade the entire morning and she asks her father a kind of test question to see if his answer might provide meaning to that dream. At the house of worship, she meets up with her best friend, who is an unbeliever, and their conversation just about makes Lisa’s memory of the dream fade away.
It’s not important to explain the windows’ designs; I made the designs such that it would be obvious to any reader that the book is a fantasy book (come on, five points of the compass!) What you should note is that there are twelve. As in the 12 tribes of Israel. Churches in real life have stained-glass windows because in the Middle Ages most people couldn’t read, so the windows depicted Biblical stories to help towards worship. The twelfth window is left blank; this is an allusion to the fact that in the Old Testament the story of salvation was unfinished, and remained so until the very first Easter Sunday.
Dreams and visions, in Holy Scripture, are important ways that God communicated to men. Jacob dreamed about angels ascending and descending on a ladder. His son Joseph’s dreams revealed the fates of his fellow inmates and helped get him out of prison, leading to Joseph being made second in Egypt only to Pharaoh. Ezekiel had a vision of the Throne of God. Daniel had visions about things to come. And Joseph had the record set straight about his fiancee, the Virgin Mary, in a dream, where he was also told what to name the Son to be born. So dreams are important ways that God communicated to His people. That is why, in the book, I opened with a dream that will directly tie in to the end of the story. The very title, The Twelfth Window, fell out of the sky. I did not have a title for the book until almost a few weeks before I turned the manuscript in to the publisher. All glory and honor to God!
In the book, Lisa asks her father about religion and gets an answer that might not necesarily have been the truth, but was the truth to him. Looking back, I noticed that his answer refers to early pagan worship of the sun. But at any rate, I meant to say to the reader that parents should be well-versed in the faith so that they can answer their child with the most correct answer about God.
Last of all, in the book, we meet Kim, Lisa’s best friend. The two girls do not share the same ideas about faith; in direct contrast to Lisa’s dream and question and reverence during worship time, Kim has no faith at all and thinks religion is a scam to make money. Many Christians have atheist friends and doubtless get into religious discussions. Of all that is seen and unseen, the atheist believes in only the seen. Sometimes that view influences a believer’s thoughts; most of the time it does (I hope) not. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t good, in my view, to have unbelieving friends. The life and behavior of a Christian serves as a witness to God, and sometimes one just has to fall back and let the Holy Spirit do the work.
You noticed that the first half of “The place was empty…” is in italics. Get used to it. It’s my way of contrasting the events and conversations in the spiritual world with the events and conversations in Lisa’s world.
There’s probably other allusions that jump out at you that I may not have mentioned or thought of yet. That’s only part of the fun of reading The Twelfth Window. Happy reading!